


An Epilogue

by tobinlaughing



Category: His Majesty's Dragon - Fandom, Temeraire - Fandom, Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Genre: Dragons, Gen, His Majesty's Dragon, Naomi Novik, Post-League of Dragons, Temeraire - Freeform, excidium - Freeform, jane roland - Freeform, long friendship, longwings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-31 14:49:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21447970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tobinlaughing/pseuds/tobinlaughing
Summary: No matter how well things end, they never really stay the same.
Relationships: Jane Roland and Excidium
Comments: 14
Kudos: 59





	An Epilogue

"Jane," Excidium said to her that morning, when she came to his clearing, "if possible, might we speak later? In private?"

Admiral Roland paused in her morning rounds, perplexed: her Excidium, her tough old bird, rarely asked for anything so out of the common way as conversation. Of course the entire world, it seemed, was set on its ear lately, and no wonder: she no small part of that, the first woman Admiral in an upstart branch of the service--and dragons in Parliament--and Napoleon defeated at last. She supposed she could allow that even Excidium would be influenced by the wild overturn of the regular order of things, and wish to try talking.

"Of course, my dear," she answered, scratching a little that favorite spot, below his ear and above the bone-spur, to be rewarded with a faint grumble of pleasure. "I must take dinner with Wellington, but I will bring my tea out here this afternoon. Will that suit?"

"That will do," the Longwing said simply, and turned back to young ensign Ethans, who was busily scrubbing the remains of breakfast from Excidium's jaw on the other side. 

Roland was very nearly late: never having needed to make an appointment to talk to Excidium, she was, after her very quick dinner-meeting with Wellington, taken quite with a fit of nerves. Not for the first time she silently blessed the necessity of taking a valet, as her resolve wavered between two formal coats and her normal bottle-green aviator’s jacket, although this last was by now so overpinned with medals, frogging, and other ridiculous frippery that it may have well been a formal coat, for all that the stitiching at the armholes was wearing out and should soon need to be redone. “Do I not have something plain?” She demanded, and when the valet shook her head, Jane threw her hands up. “Shift what you can, please, and tonight we’ll send it off for mending, I suppose, and have it on fresh tomorrow.” She sighed, and fiddled with her neck-cloth while the girl spent a few moments with a tiny knife and nimble fingers, and at last Jane had a more-or-less respectable coat to wear to go speak and have tea with the dragon she’d known her whole life. 

Excidium did not take with all of Temeraire’s notions of fine dining for dragons, but he did enjoy black pepper on his beef, and he’d been quite enchanted with the notion of tea, particularly the fragrant,strong green tea from China, sweetened heavily with sugar or molasses. Jane herself preferred coffee and milk and a little sweet biscuit, and could afford now to keep a full enough table for them both: her service, not yet a year old, included a fine, wide bowl the size of a cart wheel for Excidium’s tea, and dear old Gong Su had trained several of Dover’s attendants on the particulars of keeping tea hot in quantities suitable for dragon consumption, so neither of them would want for their vices that afternoon. Setting the service occupied a good ten minutes for Jane’s nerves to fret themselves a little more raw, and she forced herself to take a bite of biscuit and stir her coffee at least twice before speaking. 

“Well now, dear fellow,” she said, feeling as though she should put on a bluff show for him. “Is anything the matter?”

Jane looked him over, carefully. Like any other captain, she had rejoiced to see the health and good flesh returning to her beast once Laurence’s cure was shared out, and had spent so many days and nights prior to that in a crackling kind of ignorance: knowing Excidium was wasting away and not wanting to actually see it with her own eyes. She had seen him in parts: the mucus-encrusted nostrils, or the pink, foam-covered tongue, or the sand-covered jaw and bone spurs; the protruding shoulder blades and sagging ribs. The dulled orange eyes. To take the effects of the plague as a whole would be to invite the same kind of crushing break that had felled Sanderson, while the illness ran its course, and had broken Lenton and so many other captains. And so she had retreated as strategically as she could, taking the sight of Excidium in pieces and parts, trying not to see the whole of the great beast decay inexorably to defeat.

The cure had been a blessing unlooked-for. She had not dared to hope, as high as the flame of her faith in Laurence had leapt and burned in those long months of the expedition. She had not dared to dream, even while she denied that he was dying, that Excidium--and every other dragon of the Corps--would recover, and live, and fly again. 

None of the older beasts would ever be precisely the same, but her Longwing seemed--to her--to be as hale and healthy as ever he might have been. Several weeks of good feeding, plenty of rest and only leisurely duty had restored the sheen of good health to his scales and allowed new injuries to scab and scar and heal over. His wing-claws, broken during one engagement, were growing back as proper full talons, if they remained a bit stubby at present; there was nothing to be done about the grooves in his bone-spurs, as those were naturally created by the flow of his acid, but the raw patches on his jaw were healed nicely, nearly invisible, if one did not know where to look to see them. 

“Do you like being an Admiral, Jane?” He rumbled slowly, and with a start Roland realized that he had been studying her as well, with much the same concern. “I worry that that fellow Wellesley is taking so much of your time. We have been much on the ground, lately.”

“I very much enjoy the work,” Jane answered, “I shan’t deny that I derive more than a little joy seeing my orders go through, particularly if it sets some old Whitehall Admiralty type on his ear. And to be able to be out and about without having to make a cake of myself, and to see all these girls that have come so lately to the service--there’s a real pleasure in that, my dear. And I can’t call myself anything but satisfied with the outcome of the whole war, even if it took us a bloody long time to get to the end.” She set down her cup. “And you? How does it, being the flag-dragon?”

“I do quite well,” he answered, eyelids falling and rising in the half-wink that served many dragons in place of a smile. “I can’t say I am yet used to all the new stuff and nonsense, but I do very well.”

Jane considered, briefly, that this might be _all_ the talk he wished to have. Excidium was never a gregarious fellow to begin with; other dragons might consider spending entire days or whole sea-voyages arguing over some mathematical theorem or other, but her old dear would never use five words when three would do, and would rather always use action rather than conversation to make his point. And if there was nothing truly the matter to upset him...quite suddenly she found herself in her mind’s eye, looking over the curve of his shoulder at Aboukir Bay, smelling the vinegary tang of his acid on the wind mingling with the smoke from a dozen flaming ships, a dozen English beasts wheeling behind and beside them as the last ragged volley from Nelson’s fleet roared out in the hot Egyptian morning. She was nearly surprised to feel her own fingertips dance, ghost-like, over the long scar on her left cheekbone, souvenir of her first battle as Captain Roland in her own right. 

That had been their last long conversation: her, sitting upright only through sheer force of willpower in a chair in his clearing, as Excidium alternated growling at the dragon surgeons and at the human doctors. Jane’s face had been sewn together somewhat roughly as a result, but later, she dosed with hot brandy and he with a long-horned cow to himself, they had decided upon the particulars: he would not retire to the breeding grounds and she would not be the kind of captain her mother had been. They had, in total, exchanged ten complete sentences between them; it was all that had been needed, and not much else had been necessary since then. 

“We have travelled, haven’t we,” Excidium rumbled thoughtfully; he licked a sliding drop from the side of the bowl of tea and regarded her with one vivid orange eye. “Gibraltar, and Spain, and Portugal; Scotland too, Ireland, and Egypt; Copen-hagen and Burg-gund-dy.”

“Burgundy was with Mother, I think; Aboukir Bay was our first engagement together after the funeral. I wasn’t even a mid at Copenhagen, and I think I left for Loch Laggan soon after.” She sat, gazing back at him, wondering, but patient.

“We’ve got about a little then. Not as much as Lily, or that upstart--to China, but we’ve got about a little enough. Jane, I wonder,” he added, suddenly, as though an acid-spitting beast of more than a century’s military service, weighing almost sixteen tons, needed to build up the courage to ask his captain a question. “...how long will you be happy as the Admiral?”

Jane blinked. She carefully turned to the little camp table next to her chair and set down her coffee cup, then composed her hands in her lap and turned back to him. “Are you asking about retirement?”

“I know Emily’s comin’ up,” he rumbled, wagging his head a little--a gesture that had seemed always to her to be a kind of shrug, a small kind; “an’ she’s bidding fair to be a fine and bold Captain. But Jane, I think…” He paused for more than a moment. “I think Emily might want a younger ‘un than me, eh?”

Jane was on her feet and standing at his muzzle before she thought of the gesture; her hands, ungloved, found the soft hide above and between his nostrils and petted, long, slow and reassuring strokes. Laurence, speaking to her with such a plaintive tremor in his voice, would have been wrapped in her arms without the hesitation of a heartbeat; Emily, sounding so unsure, would have been pressed to her heart and cuddled close in an instant. Excidium, whose head was as long as she was tall, could not be so embraced. 

“You are in fine fettle, my dearest, my darling,” she murmured, laying her cheek on his muzzle. “You’ve been a splendid beast for my line since Grandmother, and I know you and Emily will be leading formations long after I’m in my dotage. Never you worry. Never you worry about that.”

“ ‘Tisn’ a worry, my Jane,” his voice rumbled beneath her scarred cheek, and she straightened to move back to where he could see her (always to his left eye, which she thought might see slightly more clearly than the right, where he’d gotten hit with a pepper canister during the Italy campaign). “I think...I had three Captains now, an’ you’re an Admiral. Don’t think I’m like to do better than an Admiral.” The heavy eyelid descended halfway then opened again--a gently-joking draconic smile. “Three captains and an admiral ort to be enough for any beast, anyway,” he added, and she hadn’t the heart in her to correct his maths. He wasn’t precisely _wrong_, any road, even if he wasn’t precisely _right_. 

“Emily’s had her heart set on you since she could crawl,” Jane pointed out, “and it will _break_ her heart to hear you say she ought to choose another dragon. What other dragon could hope to measure up?”

“She needs her own egg,” Excidium rumbled, turning back to slurp at his tea. “Not,” he added, “that I am _happy_ to give her up--but I am thinking of how...disappointed she will be, to have to saddle an old lizard like m’self.”

“She could never--!” Jane cried, rising again to her feet--but Excidium nosed her back into her chair, gently. 

“I ent sayin’ nothin’ against our Emily,” he explained gruffly. “I am sayin’--I am sayin’, my Jane, that this might have been my last war. I seen a few, you know. And I think it might be grand to take ship again, go to sea and take in one of these places that upstart been on about. Aus-tral-ya, or where them big Tswana fellers live. Or go by way of Halifax to the old colonies, like ol’ Gentius did, and see someplace new.”

Jane took up her coffee cup again, stirring it, if only to have something to do with her hands. “We made a fair few new Admirals in this last thrust,” she mused, slowly, stirring, the clinking of the spoon against the cup a small, soothing sound. “And I’ve lost one already, with Temeraire and Laurence retiring. Well, and why not? They were so wretchedly mauled about by the whole affair, I don’t suppose they could stay on in the service. Granby--he’s a good enough ‘un, but that beast of his will be the ruin of any discipline in the Corps at all. I need an admiral at Dover, and one at Halifax; and I’ll need Sanderson, at least, at Loch Laggan, with all the eggs still there and in Ireland…”

Excidium nosed her again, managing to get her knee and her shoulder in the same stroke. “This ent a thing to do tomorrow,” he rumbled gently. “We’re staying on a few years, I know. An’ you’re happy in this, the way your old mother weren’t. Dear Sarah wouldn’t’ve made Admiral in another twenty years.”

Jane had to laugh at that. “Ha! And can you imagine what she might’ve said? She’d have talked Wellington down and made _him_ ashamed for the suggestion! _Her,_ an Admiral!” She mocked, putting a hand up to fan her face, as though she would swoon. 

They were quiet a while longer--a comfortable, well-worn silence. Jane mused to herself that the conversation had spanned more words than Excidium would normally utter in a year. She might not hear him speak again for as long, ever. 

“You’ll have to have a hand in raising Emily’s dragon, you know,” Jane said, finally, swirling the coffee cup around a few times and then downing the remainder. “She won’t stand in her straps til she knows she has your approval. And I’ll want to bring her here, so we can tell her together, when the time comes.”

He rumbled his assent, licking the last few swirls of tea from his own bowl. She watched him, carefully again, knowing that he, too, kept an eye on her: she could see the difference, now, movements that were careful rather than confident, and slow where they had been steady the years before the illness. She realized he was right. Of course he was, dear old bird. 

“You’ll have to think carefully of where you want to visit first,” Jane said to Excidium, picking up one last biscuit from the tray; holding it between her teeth, with long-practiced ease, she pulled herself from his foreleg, up his shoulder, to the junction between his collarbone and the base of his neck, next to the harness-band. He gave another approving rumble as she settled into her accustomed seat, the habit of a lifetime, and leaned against his neck, her cheek on the glossy scales.


End file.
